Weekly PPC Roundup – Debate Edition

Anyone catch the debates? Well, the closest we are going to touch on that today is in debating whether Google’s new ad rotation changes will appease the angry mobs it created back in the summer by limiting our ad rotation options. With that, let’s dive right into it.

What’s going on with AdWords this week

Impression share reporting changes coming soon outlines some new features coming to IS reporting, including new ways to segment search vs. display, time of day and more. It’s important to download any historical data you need before the changes occur in early November. Google says “To preserve an offline copy of your pre-October historical IS data with the existing columns, you must download all desired reports before the start of November 2012″.An update on ad rotation options gives a quick update into some changes Google has made to ad rotation. Don’t worry – it’s nothing like what happened over the summer. Interestingly, though, despite all of the uproar, less than 1% of accounts have opted out of the ad rotation changes.

Helping Brands Light Up the Web has a bunch of really cool innovations coming out of Google that were announced during Advertising Week this past week. We like the new lightbox feature for display ads.

It’s often surprising to us that more companies don’t have their AdWords and Analytics data properly synched. This article drives home the point that there are really valuable metrics that advertisers should be using to determine the effectiveness of keywords, and so it is now including Analytics data in the AdWords interface! You can learn more about enabling this feature here.

And, elsewhere online…..

We’ve all felt the pain of PPC campaign bloat. All of a sudden it seems like a campaign or even an ad group have gotten out of control. This article from Search Engine Land, 5 Most Common Ways PPC Accounts Get Out Of Shape, gives some good tips to regain control, including: deleting old test ads, getting rid of outdated offers, cleaning up destination URLs, and auditing keywords and negative keywords.